RVoice: Inside Rosetta Stone

Today’s release of Rosetta Stone® Version 4 TOTALe™ is nothing short of momentous—for our company as well as for the world of language learning. We’ve filled a big market gap through this new offering.

With Version 4 TOTALe, we launch the third way to learn a new language. The trade-off of convenient self-study and live, human instruction is resolved in favor of learners—so there’s no longer a need to compromise. We’ve combined our interactive course with live, conversational tutoring and a real-time community to provide a significantly richer and better experience for all our learners. The result is even better outcomes in language acquisition. From now on, all our individual customers in the United States will not just learn on their own, they’ll also be able to practice in real time with other people. It all happens without translation or boring grammar explanations—and it can be accessed anywhere.

This is a roll-out of capabilities we made available to a limited subset of customers last year with our original TOTALe online release (which got rave reviews from learners and the media). Now we’re making these premium features available to all—so they’re now part of all our core language-learning solutions for individual learners.

Version 4 TOTALe offers four exciting new features:

Online and offline access*. Whether or not you have online access, you can still study. Many activities work even if you can’t get online, so you can do Rosetta Course™, for example, while sitting on a plane. As soon as you’re back online, you can engage in community games or practice what you’ve learned in a conversational Rosetta Studio™ session.

Single app, single icon. Our new software runs on a single application, and you use a single icon on your desktop to access Rosetta Stone TOTALe, whether or not you’re online—like many of the apps you enjoy on your iPhone® or iPad® device. You never need to use your own web browser.

Continuity. We offer a perpetual license to Rosetta Course, so you can come back and continue learning, even if you take a break for a few months.

Mobility. You get access to Rosetta Stone TOTALe Companion™, an application that runs on your iPod Touch® or your iPhone® device**. It helps you practice pronunciation when you’re on the go.

Of course, Version 4 TOTALe realizes its potential through the dedicated work of our tutors, who lead you in live practice sessions, and our support teams. We’ve hired and trained individuals committed to creating success, and they’re eager to start working with new learners. These groundbreaking services are poised to become a defining element of what makes us unique in business and language learning.